Similar Principles: The Animal Rights Movement, Feminism, and Abortion Opponents

Movements with a Similar Agenda

Like the nineteenth century movements to abolish human slavery and emancipate
women, the contemporary movements in animal rights and prenatal rights move
along parallel lines. Because similar moral principles are involved, the
rational, secular, ethical debate over animal rights is beginning to resemble
the raging debate over abortion. Animal-rights activists have even shown
themselves to be "anti-choice," depending upon the issue. An article in The
Animal's Voice Magazine, for example, states:

"Exit polls in Aspen, Colorado, after the failed 1989 fur ban was voted on,
found that most people were against fur but wanted people to have a choice to
wear it. Instead of giving in, we should take the offensive and state in no
uncertain terms that to abuse and kill animals is wrong, period! There is no
choice because another being had to suffer to produce that item. . . . I want to
repeat that an eventual ban on fur would be impossible if we tell people that
they have some sort of 'choice' to kill. . . . Remember, no one has the right to
choose death over life for another being."[1]

The anti-abortion movement and the animal-rights movement use words and
phrases like "respecting life" and "compassion." Both compare the mass slaughter
of animals and the mass execution of unborn children to the Holocaust. Both see
their cause as part of the human-rights movement, and consider themselves as
extending human rights to a disenfranchised minority.

Anti-abortion activists counsel young women on sidewalks outside abortion
clinics. Animal-rights activists talk to "sport" hunters about compassion for
other living creatures. Activists in both movements have even picketed the homes
of physicians or medical researchers who perform abortions or experiment upon
animals. The controversial use of human fetal tissue for medical research brings
these two causes even closer together.

Both movements have components that engage in nonviolent civil disobedience,
and both have their militant factions -- the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and
Operation Rescue. The popular news media usually depict animal-rights and
anti-abortion activists as extremists, fanatics, or terrorists who violate the
law. Each movement, nonetheless, has its intelligentsia: moral philosophers,
physicians, clergy, legal counsel, and others.

Feminist writer Carol J. Adams notes the parallels: "A woman attempts to
enter a building. Others, amassed outside, try to thwart her attempt. They shout
at her, physically block her way, frantically call her names, pleading with her
to respect life. Is she buying a fur coat or getting an abortion?"[2]

The Fur Information Council of America asks: "If fashion isn't about freedom
of choice, what is? Personal choice is not just a fur industry issue. It's
everybody's issue."[3] As in the abortion debate, lines are drawn. "Freedom of
choice" vs. taking an innocent life. "Personal lifestyle" vs. violating
another's rights.

Activists, no matter how sincere, are frequently accused of
self-righteousness. Still, they continue to stir the nation's moral conscience,
often using graphic pictures and videotapes of tortured animals or abortion
victims.

Sentience

As far as the moral issue of animal rights is concerned, we may safely
conclude that full grown animals do have rights. It is merely a matter of
time before our courts, legislatures, and Constitution recognize this
self-evident truth, as was the case with the rights of Blacks and the rights of
women. Animals are autonomous beings, possessing levels of conscious awareness
comparable to those of small human children (or at least the mentally
handicapped).

Full grown animals are highly complex creatures, possessing a brain, a
central nervous system and a sophisticated mental life. Animals suffer at
the hands of their human tormentors and exhibit "such 'human' behaviors and
feelings as fear and physical pain, defense of their children, pair bonding,
group/tribal loyalty, grief at the loss of loved ones, joy, jealousy,
competition, territoriality, and cooperation."[4]

Dr. Tom Regan, the foremost intellectual leader of the animal-rights movement
and author of The Case for Animal Rights, notes that animals "have
beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including
their own future; preference and welfare interests; the ability to initiate
action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over
time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares
well or ill for them, logically independent of their utility for others and
logically independent of their being the object of anyone else's interests."[5]

Similarly, research psychologist Theodore Barber writes in his 1993 book,
The Human Nature of Birds, that birds are intelligent beings, capable of
flexible thought, judgment, and the ability to express opinions, desires, and
choices just as humans do. According to Barber, birds can make and use tools,
work with abstract concepts, exhibit grief, joy, compassion and altruism, create
musical compositions, and perform intricate mathematical calculations in
navigation.[6]

Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to the author of a book that, in order to
refute the then common view that they had limited intellectual capacities,
emphasized the notable intellectual achievements of Blacks : "Whatever be their
degree of talent, it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was
superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the property
or persons of others."[7] If a higher amount of intelligence does not entitle
one human being to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle human
animals to exploit nonhuman animals for the same purpose?

The eloquent abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth dealt with this point
in her famous "Ain't I a Woman" speech when addressing the question of "this
thing in the head," the intellect: "What's that got to do with woman's rights or
Negro's rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart,
wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?"[8]

Similarly, Jeremy Bentham pondered what reasons were sufficient to abandon a
sensitive being to the caprice of a tormentor: "Is it the faculty of reason or
perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full grown horse or dog is beyond
comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant
of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what
would it avail? The question is not, 'Can they reason?,' nor 'Can they talk?,'
but 'Can they suffer?'"[9]

The animal-rights movement thus rejects belonging to the human race as the
criterion for "personhood," or membership in our moral community, as a form of
discrimination, comparable to racism or sexism. Sentience, or the ability
to experience pleasure and pain, is recognized as the only morally relevant
criteria.

Sentience is relevant in the abortion debate. In a 1981 article entitled "The
Experience of Pain by the Unborn," John T. Noonan, Jr., professor of law at the
University of California at Berkeley, asks, "Does a stone feel pain?" He insists
that "to those concerned with the defense of life, it makes no difference
whether the life taken is that of a person who is unconscious or drugged or
drunk or in full possession of his senses; a life has been destroyed. But there
are those who . . . will not respond to argument about killing because they
regard the unborn as a kind of abstraction . . . but who nonetheless might
respond to evidence of pain suffered in the process of abortion."[10] Noonan
then proceeds to make a case for empathy with fetal pain based upon the analogy
to animals.

Noonan cites a campaign launched in England in 1928 against the cruel method
of trapping animals. He writes of a 1968 California statute that says cattle
must be rendered unconscious before being "cut, shackled, hoisted, thrown or
cast." He also mentions a 1972 California statute that calls for painless
methods in euthanizing animals.

"It may seem paradoxical, if not perverse, to defend the unborn by
considering what has been done for animals," Noonan admits, "but the animal
analogies are instructive on three counts: they show what can be done if empathy
with suffering is awakened. They make possible an a fortiori case -- if
you will do this for an animal, why not for a child? And they exhibit a
successful response to the most difficult question when the pain of a being
without language is addressed -- how do we know what is being experienced?"[11]

Noonan observes: "Human infants and all animals brought up by parents will
cry and scream . . . What we do with animals to be able to say that they are in
pain is precisely what we do with the newborn and the infant: we empathize. We
suppose for this purpose that animals are, in fact, 'like us,' and we interpret
the context of the cry."

According to Noonan, "We may conclude that as soon as a pain mechanism is
present in the fetus -- possibly as early as day 56 -- the [abortion] methods
used will cause pain. The pain is more substantial and lasts longer the later
the abortion is. It is most severe and lasts the longest when the method is
saline poisoning.

"Whatever the method used, the unborn are experiencing the greatest of bodily
evils, the ending of their lives. They are undergoing the death agony. However
inarticulate, however slight their cognitive powers, however rudimentary their
sensations, they are sentient creatures undergoing the disintegration of their
being and the termination of their vital capabilities."

Noonan concludes, "There are no laws which regulate the suffering of the
aborted like those sparing pain to dying animals . . . Can human beings who
understand what may be done for animals and what cannot be done for unborn
humans want this inequality of treatment to continue? . . . Can those who feel
for the harpooned whale not be touched by the situation of the salt-soaked
baby?"[12]

The relevance of sentience in the abortion debate was also brought up on
January 30, 1984, by then-President Ronald Reagan. "When the lives of the unborn
are snuffed out, they often feel pain -- pain that is long and agonizing." On
March 6, 1984, Reagan further stated, "As abortions are performed, the unborn
children being killed often feel excruciating pain."[13]

Were these remarks Reagan's usual gaffes? Abortion supporters reacted
swiftly. On the day following the President's first statement, Dr. Ervin
Nichols, spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists, said: "We are unaware of any evidence of any kind that would
substantiate a claim that pain is perceived by a fetus."[14] This admission of
ignorance was widely touted by the media as if it contradicted Reagan's
assertions.

Meanwhile, 26 other specialists in this field, including two past presidents
of the same Academy, sent a letter to Washington that read: "Mr. President, in
drawing attention to the capability of the human fetus to feel pain, you stand
on firmly established ground." One physician, Dr. William Hogan, cited numerous
texts on fetology as evidence that fetuses feel pain.[15]

More recently, in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet,
British researchers acknowledge "direct evidence that the fetus has a hormonal
stress response" to such invasive procedures as the "termination of pregnancy,
especially by surgical techniques involving dismemberment."[16]

In their booklet, Fetal Pain and Abortion: The Medical Evidence,
doctors observed: "The prospect of fetal pain -- pain that results from abortion
-- cuts through philosophical abstractions and scientific nomenclature,
proceeding directly to the heart . . . The significance of this lies in the
tendency of most people to make ethical and political judgements based on the
empathetic or sympathetic impulses that have little to do with reason or notions
of justice."[17]

Discrimination

In an article entitled "Pro-Abortionists Poison Feminism," Rosemary Bottcher,
currently President of Feminists for Life of America, also describes abortion as
a form of discrimination:

Pro-abortion feminists resent the discrimination against a whole class of
humans because they happen to be female, yet they themselves discriminate
against a whole class of humans because they happen to be very young.

They resent that the value of a woman is determined by whether some man
wants her, yet they declare that the value of an unborn child is determined by
whether some woman wants him. They resent that women have been "owned" by
their husbands, yet insist that the unborn are "owned" by their mothers.

They believe that a man's right to do what he pleases with his own body
cannot include the right to sexually exploit women, yet proclaim that a
woman's similar right means that she can kill her unborn child.[18]

Animal-rights activists, likewise, reject "speciesism," or membership in the
human race, as a criterion for personhood; they deem it a form of
discrimination. Genetics determine the color of one's eyes, skin, etc. In a
paper presented before the Conference on Creation Theology and Environmental
Ethics at the World Council of Churches in Annecy, France, in September 1988,
Tom Regan expressed opposition to discrimination based upon such genetic
differences: "Biological differences inside the species Homo sapiens
do not justify radically different treatment among those individual humans who
differ biologically (for example, in terms of sex, or skin color, or chromosome
count). Why, then, should biological differences outside our species
count morally? If having one eye or deformed limbs do not disqualify a human
being from moral consideration equal to that given to those humans who are more
fortunate, how can it be rational to disqualify a rat or a wolf from equal moral
consideration because, unlike us, they have paws and a tail?"[19]

Genetics is often cited by abortion opponents as the science that allows us
to distinguish humans from nonhumans. In the language of animal liberation,
genetics would allow us to distinguish sentient species from insentient species
(e.g., plants).

Slavery

Like abortion opponents drawing a parallel between the Dred Scott decision
and Roe v. Wade, Regan also draws a parallel between human and animal
slavery in The Case for Animal Rights:

The very notion that farm animals should continue to be viewed as legal
property must be challenged.

To view them in this way implies that we cannot make sense of viewing them
as legal persons. But the history of the law shows only too well, and too
painfully, how arbitrary the law can be on this crucial matter. Those humans
who were slaves were not recognized as legal persons in pre-Civil War America.

There is no reason to assume that because animals are not presently
accorded this status that they cannot intelligibly be viewed in this way or
that they should not be. If our predecessors had made this same assumption in
the case of human slaves, the legal status of these human beings would have
remained unchanged.[20]

Both movements compare themselves to the nineteenth century abolitionists who
sought to end human slavery. In Animal Liberation, for example, Peter
Singer writes that the "tyranny of human over nonhuman animals" is "causing an
amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted
from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans."[21] Similarly,
Dr. J. C. Willke, former president of the National Right to Life Committee,
entitled a book Abortion and Slavery.

As a liberal opponent of abortion (at the time), the Reverend Jesse Jackson
once observed that the "privacy" argument used in Roe v. Wade to justify
abortion "was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or
treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore
outside of your right to be concerned."[22]

Escalating Violence: The "Slippery Slope"

Anti-abortion activists consider abortion the ultimate form of child abuse,
and claim that since abortion was legalized, child abuse rates have risen
dramatically. Acceptance of abortion, they argue, leads to a devaluation of
human life, and paves the way toward acceptance of infanticide and euthanasia.
Animal-rights activists, likewise, compare the rights of animals to those of
very young human children, insisting that a lack of respect for the lives and
rights of animals brutalizes humans into insensitivity towards one another.

In his Diet for a New America, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, author
John Robbins writes of a Soviet study, published in "Ogonyok," that found that
over 87 percent of a group of violent criminals had, as children, burned, hanged
or stabbed domestic animals. Dr. Stephen Kellert of Yale also found that
children who abuse animals have a much higher likelihood of becoming violent
criminals.[23]

Seventeenth century English metaphysician John Locke, who influenced Thomas
Jefferson, attacked cruelty to animals in his essay "Thoughts on Education,"
which dealt with the issue of raising children to be virtuous and humane. "This
tendency to cruelty should be watched in them," wrote Locke, "and, if they
incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the
custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their hearts
even towards men. And, they who delight in the suffering and destruction of
inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those
of their own kind. Children should from the beginning be brought up in an
abhorrence of killing or tormenting any living creature." [24]

Count Leo Tolstoy became a vegetarian in 1885. Giving up "sport" hunting, he
advocated "vegetarian pacifism" and was opposed to killing even the smallest of
living creatures, such as the ants. He believed there was a natural progression
of violence that led inevitably to war among human beings. In his essay "The
First Step," Tolstoy wrote that flesh-eating is "simply immoral, as it involves
the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling -- killing." By
killing, Tolstoy argued, "man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest
spiritual capacity -- that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like
himself -- and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply
seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!"[25]

No argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an
argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because
they cannot prevent us and because we are backing up our own side in the
struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals,
enemies or capitalists for the same reason. Indeed, experiments on men have
already begun. We all hear that Nazi scientists have done them. We all suspect
that or own scientists may begin to do so, in secret, at any moment.

The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of
ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a
triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which
Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements.[26]

Lewis's words about "experiments on inferior men" can apply directly to fetal
experimentation, of course. They are also especially relevant to the abortion
debate and anti-abortionists' belief in the "slippery slope," or the idea that
acceptance of abortion leads to a devaluation of life and paves the way toward
acceptance of worse forms of violence.

Animals are sentient, autonomous beings possessing many mental capacities
comparable to those of human children. If we fail to see animals as part of our
moral community, how will we ever extend our sphere of moral concern to embrace
humans in their most primitive stages of development? Anti-abortionists look in
horror as an entire class of humans are systematically stripped of their rights,
executed, and even used as tools for medical research. Yet this is what we
humans have been doing to other sentient creatures for millennia.

Marjorie Spiegel, author of The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal
Slavery, writes: "All oppression and violence is intimately and ultimately
linked, and to think that we can end prejudice and violence to one group without
ending prejudice and violence is utter folly."[27]

Animals and Children

The parallel between animal abuse and child abuse is very real. Neither can
the connection between the rights of animals and the rights of children (born or
unborn) be ignored.

Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals (ASPCA), successfully prosecuted a woman for child abuse in 1873, at a
time when children had no legal protection, under the then currently existing
animal-protection statutes. This case started the child-saving crusade around
the world.[28]

English philosopher John Stuart Mill observed: "The reasons for legal
intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those
unfortunate slaves -- the animals." According to Mill, "every great movement
must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption."[29]

Feminism

An even stronger connection can be made between the rights of animals and the
rights of women, living under the thumb of a "macho" patriarchy. While it is
known that the feminist movement originally opposed abortion as "child-murder"
and as a form of violence that women were forced to turn to in a patriarchal
society, a society that shows virtually no concern or respect for new mothers,
it is generally not known that many of the early American feminists--including
Lucy Stone, Amelia Bloomer, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton--were
connected with the nineteenth century animal-welfare movement. They would meet
to toast "Women's Rights and Vegetarianism."[30] In 1907, Flora T. Neff asked,
"Why do we make one reform topic a hobby and forget all others? Mercy,
Prohibition, Vegetarianism, Woman's Suffrage and Peace would make Old Earth a
paradise, and yet the majority advocate but one, if any, of these."[31] Many of
the early American feminists thus saw animal rights as the logical next step in
social progress after women's rights and civil rights.

Tolstoy similarly described ethical vegetarianism as social progress: "And
there are ideas of the future, of which some are already approaching realization
and are obliging people to change their way of life and to struggle against the
former ways: such ideas in our world as those of freeing the laborers, of giving
equality to women, of ceasing to use flesh food, and so on."[32]

Civil Rights

Connections can also be made between animal rights, civil rights, and the
rights of the human unborn. In her preface to The Dreaded Comparison: Human
and Animal Slavery, Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple,
concludes: "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not
made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for
men."[33]

At a rally in San Francisco protesting the use of animals in medical
research, former Alameda County supervisor John George said, "My people were the
first laboratory animals in America."[34] African-Americans suffered at the
hands of research scientists just as animals continue to do today.

Animals and humans suffer and die alike. If you had to kill your own hog
before you ate it, most likely you would not be able to do it. To hear the hog
scream, to see the blood spill, to see the baby being taken away from its
momma, and to see the look of death in the animal's eye would turn your
stomach. So you get the man at the packing house to do the killing for you. In
like manner, if the wealthy aristocrats who are perpetrating conditions in the
ghetto actually heard the screams of ghetto suffering, or saw the slow death
of hungry little kids, or witnessed the strangulation of manhood and dignity,
they could not continue the killing. But the wealthy are protected from such
horror. . . . If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the
conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one.[35]

In 1973, Gregory drew a connection between vegetarianism and nonviolent civil
disobedience: "The philosophy of nonviolence, which I learned from Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. during my involvement in the civil rights movement was first
responsible for my change in diet. I became a vegetarian in 1965. I had been a
participant in all of the 'major' and most of the 'minor' civil rights
demonstrations of the early sixties, including the March on Washington and the
Selma to Montgomery March. Under the leadership of Dr. King, I became totally
committed to nonviolence, and I was convinced that nonviolence meant opposition
to killing in any form. I felt the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' applied to
human beings not only in their dealings with each other -- war, lynching,
assassination, murder and the like -- but in their practice of killing animals
for food or sport. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. . . . Violence
causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the
same arrogant, cruel and brutal taking of life."[36]

In a 1979 interview, Gregory explained: "I didn't become a vegetarian for
health reasons; I became a vegetarian strictly for moral reasons. . . .
Vegetarianism will definitely become a people's movement." When asked if humans
will ultimately have to answer to a Supreme Being for their exploitation of
animals, Gregory replied, "I think we answer for that every time we go to the
hospital with cancer and other diseases."[37]

Gregory has also expressed the opinion that the plight of the poor will
improve as humans cease to slaughter animals: "I would say that the treatment of
animals has something to do with the treatment of people. The Europeans have
always regarded their slaves and the people they have colonialized as
animals."[38]

Many African-Americans have viewed abortion as a type of genocide. For
example, civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer taught, "The methods used to
take human lives, such as abortion, the pill, the ring, etc., amount to
genocide. I believe that legal abortion is legal murder."[39]

Liberal Politics

Colman McCarthy, columnist for the Washington Post, is a good example
of an ethical vegetarian, and is someone who may truly be called pro-life.
McCarthy teaches filled-to-capacity classes on nonviolence in high schools and
colleges in the Washington, D.C., area. He speaks eloquently about the rights of
"our fellow Earthians, whom we call animals."

"How many of you had a corpse for lunch today?" he asks his students. "What
part of any animal did you eat? A Leg? A rib? . . . I never call it meat --
that's just a euphemism. You know why I avoid dairy products and eggs? Because
they're sexist; it's the females in the barns and henhouses. What do you think
of that?"[40] McCarthy writes about public education, the violence of our
meat-producing and chemical-agriculture industries, and the wasted millions of
dollars spent on military buildup and high-school ROTC programs. He also takes
an ardent stance against abortion. "Have you heard the new pro-choice strategy?"
he asked in the spring of 1989 after a huge abortion rally in Washington, D.C.
"Now they're all saying nobody wants an abortion, but that it's important
to keep the option open. That's like a general who says he doesn't like war, but
wants to keep it as an option just in case. You don't find peace through war,
and you don't enhance life through killing babies."[41]

A 1972 Presidential commission on population growth recommended legalizing
abortion, with only a few voices dissenting. One of those expressing opposition
to legalized abortion was Graciela Olivarez, a Chicana active in civil rights
and anti-poverty work. "The poor cry out for justice and equality," she
explained, "and we respond with legalized abortion. I believe that in a society
that permits the life of even one individual (born or unborn) to be dependent on
whether that life is 'wanted' or not, all its citizens stand in danger. . . . We
do not have equal opportunities. Abortion is a cruel way out."[42]

Soon after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, one of the most liberal
Senate Democrats, Harold Hughes, joined one of the most liberal Republicans,
Mark Hatfield, in co-sponsoring a Human Life Amendment. Both were active in the
anti-war movement, and both opposed abortion because of their political views.
Michael Harrington once called the anti-abortion movement one of the only true
grassroots movements to emerge from the 1970s.[43]

In an article appearing in the September 1980 issue of The Progressive
entitled "Abortion: The Left Has Betrayed the Sanctity of Life," Mary Meehan
wrote:

If much of the leadership of the pro-life movement is right-wing, that is
due largely to the default of the Left. We . . . who marched against the war
and now march against abortion would like to see leaders of the Left speaking
out on behalf of the unborn. But we see only a few, such as Dick Gregory, Mark
Hatfield, Richard Neuhaus, Mary Rose Oakar. Most of the others either avoid
the issue or support abortion.

We are dismayed by their inconsistency. And we are not impressed by
arguments that we should work and vote for them because they are good on such
issues as food stamps and medical care . . . . The traditional mark of the
Left has been it protection of the underdog, the weak, and the poor. . .
abortion is a civil rights issue.[44]

Rosemary Bottcher similarly criticized the Left for its failure to take a
stand against abortion, In an article appearing in the Tallahassee Democrat,
she wrote:

The same people who wax hysterical at the thought of executing, after
countless appeals, a criminal convicted of some revolting crime would have
insisted on his mother's unconditional right to have him killed while he was
still innocent. The same people who organized a boycott of the Nestle Company
for its marketing of infant formula in underdeveloped lands would have
approved of the killing of those exploited infants only a few months before.
The same people who talk incessantly of human rights are willing to deny the
most helpless and vulnerable of all human beings the most important right of
all. Apparently these people do not understand the difference between
contraception and abortion. Their arguments defending abortion would be
perfectly reasonable if they were talking about contraception. When they
insist upon "reproductive freedom" and "motherhood by choice" they forget that
"pregnant" means "being with child." A pregnant woman has already reproduced;
she is already a mother.[45]

Population and Environment

The threat of overpopulation and global famine is often used by abortion
defenders to justify abortion as another necessary form of birth control. What
does the future hold? According to Keith Akers in A Vegetarian Sourcebook,
if the world population triples in the next century, and if meat production
would triple as well, then instead of 3.7 billion acres of cropland and 7.5
billion acres of grazing land, we would require 11.1 billion acres of cropland
and 22.5 billion acres of grazing land. Unfortunately, this is slightly more
than the total land mass of the six inhabited continents! We are already
desperately short of groundwater, topsoil, forests and energy. Even if we were
to resort to extreme methods of population control -- abortion, infanticide,
genocide, etc. -- modest increases in the world's population during the next
century would make it impossible to maintain current levels of meat consumption.
On a vegetarian diet, however, the world could support a population several
times its present size. The world's cattle alone consume enough to feed 8.7
billion humans.[46]

The fact that raising animals for food uses vast amounts of land, water, and
other resources for a remarkably meager return in protein and calories was
delineated in Frances Moore Lappe's landmark 1971 book, Diet for a Small
Planet. She called the animals who were fed grain "protein factories in
reverse." It takes sixteen pounds of grain and soy to produce one pound of
feedlot beef. "To give you some basis for comparison," she wrote, "sixteen
pounds of grain has twenty-one times more calories and eight times more protein
-- but only three times more fat -- than a pound of hamburger."[47]

There are environmental considerations as well, as are detailed at length in
Robbin's book. Half the water consumed in the United States goes to irrigate
land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are also used
to wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce twenty times more excrement
than does the entire human population, creating sewage that is ten to several
hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause
ten times more water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat
industry causes three times more harmful organic water pollution than the rest
of the nation's industries combined. Meat producers are the foremost industrial
polluters, contributing to half the water pollution in the United States. The
water that goes into a thousand-pound steer could float a destroyer. It takes 26
gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a
pound of meat.

If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, the cheapest
hamburger meat would be $35.00 per pound! The burden of subsidizing the
California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock
producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar that the
state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over seven dollars in
lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. Seventeen western
states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as
large as the present.

Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into
desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil every year, and 85 percent of this
is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're
chopping down our forests.

Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the United States has been one acre
every five seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for
grazing or growing livestock feed. One-third of all raw materials in the United
States are consumed by the livestock industry, and it takes three times as much
fossil-fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods.[48]

In an article entitled "Parallels Between Abortion and Eco-Abortion," Paul C.
Christian wrote:

Is there any connection between how our society abuses our planet and how
we abuse unborn children through abortion? . . . Imagine the earth as a sort
of cosmic egg. It is not unlike the human fetus in a woman's womb. . . . Both
also have great amounts of water, an essential ingredient of life as we know
it. . . .

Saline abortions are performed by removing amniotic fluid and injecting a
salty solution in its place, which causes death by burning all exposed tissue.
Are we not doing something similar to our planet via acid rain, which "burns"
trees and other plants and even kills whole lakes, fish and all? . . .

Another form of abortion involves cutting up the living unborn child and
removing it. Are we not doing a similar thing on a different scale by tearing
down the rain forests? . . .

A child not given a chance to live is lost to us. We can never benefit from
what she or he could have contributed to our world. Yet we humans not only
kill our offspring, but whole species of other animals and plants as well. The
possible benefits of these are lost to us forever, too . . .

Perhaps we should call what we are doing to the earth eco-abortion. . . .
We must nurture and protect life both in the womb and around the globe. It
will not do to save one and lose the other, for they are but two sides of the
same coin.[49]

Assembly Lines

Among abortion opponents, the nature of the modern abortion clinic as an
assembly line is well-known. The public perception of abortion being "safe and
legal," together with an assumption that it is treated like medical care, does
not match reality. Dr. Edward Allred, an abortion provider, stated this
explicitly when he said: "Very commonly we hear patients say they feel like
they're on an assembly line. We tell them they're right. It is an assembly line.
. . . We're trying to be as cost effective as possible, and speed is important.
. . . We try to use the physician for his technical skills and reduce the
one-on-one relationship with the patient. We usually see the patient for the
first time on the operating table and then not again."[50]

The dehumanization of women in this fashion, depriving them of the individual
attention normally expected in medical situations, also deprives them of the
after-care and worsens the psychological ramifications.

One clinic, Ob/Gyn Services, in presenting itself as superior to other
clinics, ran classified ads in 1991 in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
They read: "Don't be herded like a cow." The advertisements also assured
potential clients that the stay at the clinic would only be one hour; the
discrepancy was never explained.

The mention of the treatment of animals, however, was not coincidental, and
unfortunately, merely being "herded" is primarily a practice of yesteryear. For
modern cattle, pigs, and chickens, the assembly-line nature of factory farming
leaves sentient creatures treated with incredible cruelty. The laws on humane
treatment of animals do not apply to those who are destined to be eaten.

Animal-rights activists are aware of the appalling assembly-line conditions,
but most members of the public are under the misconception that animals live
happy lives on farms before being converted into food. In fact, chickens are
stacked up in close proximity in cages in buildings where their sensitivity to
light, which makes the rooster crow at sunrise, is frustrated. They live under
such insanity-producing conditions that they injure each other in pecking
attacks. This is prevented by cutting their beaks off, a painful
procedure. The cause of the problem, hysteria-producing conditions for highly
social animals, remains, but the injuries are fewer without the beaks.[51]
Poultry Digest reports the typical egg factory holds 80,000 hens per
warehouse.[52]

Pigs are highly sociable animals. Subject to the confinement and abuse of
modern factory farming, pigs are placed on metal slatted floors without bedding,
which would cost money. Their feet are not designed for this, and the conditions
damage them. The editors of Farmer and Stockbreeder explain: "The slatted
floor seems to have more merit than disadvantages. The animal will usually be
slaughtered before serious deformity sets in."[53]

Abortion opponents are familiar with the assembly-line nature of most
abortion clinics, and animal-rights activists know about the assembly-line
nature of most factory farms, but the information is not exchanged very well
between these two movements. The general public, meanwhile, is mostly unaware of
either one. Members of the public know that abortion and infanticide and cruelty
to nonhuman animals have been going on since time immemorial, but are unaware
that in the modern world these cruelties have multiplied and been
institutionalized in an assembly-line format. In both instances, the most
efficient way of making money is being sought, with an eye to low production
prices and a cheaper final product, which draws more customers and therefore
greater profits. The suffering that is caused to women and to animals is not put
into calculations that are based on profit, not compassion.

Rights Language

In an article on animal rights entitled "Just Like Us?," Gary Francione, a
former Supreme Court law clerk and a professor of law at the University of
Pennsylvania, explained:

I believe that animals have rights. This is not to say that animals
have the same rights we do, but the reasons that lead us to accord certain
rights to human beings are equally applicable to animals.

The problem is that our value system doesn't permit the breadth of vision
necessary to understand that. We currently use the category of "species" as
the relevant criterion for determining membership in our moral community, just
as we once used race and sex to determine that membership.

If you had asked white men in 1810 whether Blacks had rights, most of them
would have laughed at you. What was necessary then is necessary now. We must
change the way we think: a paradigm shift in the way we think about animals.
Rights for Blacks and women were the constitutional issues of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Animal rights, once more people understand
the issue, will emerge as the civil rights movement of the twenty-first
century."[54]

In that same article, bioethicist Art Caplan warned: "If you cheapen the
currency of rights language, you've got to worry that rights may not be taken
seriously. Soon you will have people arguing that trees have rights and that
embryos have rights."

Ingrid Newkirk, Executive Director of People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals, then responded: "Art, wouldn't you rather err on the side of giving out
too many rights rather than too few?" The leader of America's largest
animal-rights organization (400,000 strong) is thus open to the possibility that
embryos have rights.

Likewise, opponents of abortion should be open to the possibility that other
sentient species may have rights. It may be tempting for us as humans to
consider only the possible rights of the human unborn and exclude all others
because they are not part of our "human family," but Newkirk argues that our
laws should not be based upon such anthropomorphic prejudices: "If a building
were burning and a baby baboon, a baby rat, and a baby child were inside, I'm
sure I would save the child. But if the baboon mother went into the building,
I'm sure she would take out the infant baboon. It's just that there is an
instinct to save yourself first, then your immediate family, your countrymen,
and on to your species. But we have to recognize and reject the self-interest
that erects these barriers and try to recognize the rights of others who happen
not be exactly like ourselves."[55]

To many the thought of giving rights to fully grown animals is as absurd as
giving rights to the human unborn. Cambridge philosopher Thomas Taylor actually
tried to refute Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women
by arguing that if women could be given liberation, then so could animals, and
that since this is "absurd," giving women liberation must be equally absurd. He
entitled his parody A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes.[56]

Movement Connections

In an article in Harmony, a journal devoted to the consistent-life
ethic, Jean Blackwood wrote:

"Prolifers, even 'consistent ethic' ones, are oddly silent about the ozone
hole, the greenhouse effect, the slaughter of whales, the cruelty of factory
farming and lab research . . . Animal rights and environmental supporters do not
tend to recognize the inherent value of unborn humans. My membership in PETA got
my name on the mailing list for Planned Parenthood!"[57]

One of the leading proponents of animal rights, Peter Singer, is subject to
widespread criticism from abortion opponents. Singer contrasts the unborn or
newborn and severely mentally incapacitated humans with fully grown animals, and
finds them less worthy of having their lives protected. He concludes that the
interests of these humans need not be taken into account when determining social
policy. This view has offended many abortion opponents, and it interferes with
the goal of explaining the importance of animal rights to those in the
right-to-life movement. Conversely, however, the reasons for opposition to
abortion could be most effectively conveyed to animal-rights activists by those
who are also sympathetic to animal welfare.

In her article "Animal Rights and the Feminist Connection," Ingrid Newkirk
writes:

Inherent in feminist ideology is the basic philosophy of freedom from
oppression for all living beings. Many feminists, however, . . . are guilty of
the same kind of supremacy clung to by males in our society. . . .

How many feminists realize (or want to realize) how much violence,
oppression and suffering they support at the meat counter, the dairy case, the
leather goods store, the fur shops and the cosmetics counter? Do they know
about crated veal calves, caged and de-beaked chickens, 'super-ovulated' dairy
cows, trapped or 'ranch-raised' fur animals and blinded rabbits? . . .

Feminists should recognize that their attitudes to members of other species
are a form of prejudice no less objectionable than prejudice about a person's
race or sex. Early American feminists from Lucy Stone, Amelia Bloomer, Susan
B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton . . . and others have condemned animal
slavery. Let all true feminists -- women and men -- join their expansive
feminism and we'll make a substantive move away from all exploitation and
oppression.[58]

The early American feminists, of course, also opposed abortion as a form of
violence and as a tool of the patriarchy. In a 1995 interview on the Dennis
Prager Show in Los Angeles, Newkirk admitted that the animal-rights movement is
divided on the issue of abortion.

Where should an animal-rights activist stand with regard to abortion?
Mohandas Gandhi, India's great apostle of nonviolence, once wrote that "it would
seem to me clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime."[59]

To all animal-rights activists, it would seem to be clear as daylight that
animals have rights, just as children, women, Blacks, or the mentally
handicapped have rights. Any leanings the animal-rights movement may presently
have in favor of abortion will change if abortion opponents get involved
with the struggle for animal rights.

Because of the great divisions over the abortion issue, for animal-rights
activists to align themselves solely with pro-abortion people may prove suicidal
in the long run. The abortion issue will not go away. Animal-rights activists
may thus find it in their best interest to begin networking with the liberal
wing of the right-to-life movement.

A popular liberal bumper sticker reads: "No one is free when others are
oppressed." Whether we talk about extending "human" rights to animals or to the
unborn, we are still talking about expanding our sphere of moral concern to
embrace a disenfranchised class of beings.

Animal-rights activists and prenatal-rights activists should, if anything, be
sympathetic toward each others' causes, because similar moral principles are
involved. If animal-rights activists can imagine a future in which all forms of
animals exploitation have been abolished, it should not be too difficult to
imagine a world in which abortions are not practiced.

The anti-abortion movement seeks to extend human rights to the unborn,
recognizing human rights from fertilization until death. Yet it fails to
recognize the rights of other sentient creatures. The animal liberation movement
seeks to extend "human" rights to all sentient creatures, but often fails to
take their development and potentiality into account. A broader secular,
political movement, encompassing the rights of all sentient creatures at
every stage of development, will undoubtedly attain great success.

Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1948): 311. Because this book is
a classic, it has been published in many editions by many publishers; the
quotation comes from the first footnote to chapter 17.

Quoted in Jeff Hensley, The Zero People (Toronto: Life Cycle Books,
1983): 142.

Ibid., 143-44.

Ibid., 152.

Quoted in Patrick Kahler, "Fetal Pain Abortion: The Medical Evidence,"
Studies in Law and Medicine, 18, Americans United for Life (1983).